Ancient Kamiros

On the northwestern coast of Rhodes, roughly 3 kilometres west of the village of Kalavarda and some 34 kilometres from Rhodes Town, lie the ruins of Kamiros — one of three ancient city-states, alongside Ialysos and Lindos, that governed the island before it unified under a single capital in 408 BC. Settled by Dorian Greeks over an earlier Mycenaean-era community, Kamiros grew into a planned city whose temple foundations were begun at least as early as the 8th century BC, and it is the least disturbed of the three: after antiquity it was never resettled.

One of Homer's Three Cities

Kamiros appears in the Iliad. In the Catalogue of Ships in Book 2, Tlepolemos, son of Herakles, brings nine ships from Rhodes, whose people are described as dwelling in three divisions — Lindos, Ialysos and "shining Kameiros". That passage reaches back into the late Mycenaean period, and the archaeology broadly supports it: a Mycenaean necropolis near Kalavarda shows the area was occupied by Achaean Greeks before the Dorians arrived at the start of the first millennium BC.

For centuries the three cities existed side by side. In 408 BC they combined into a single state and founded a new capital at the northern tip of the island, on the site of the modern town of Rhodes. That did not empty the old cities; life continued at Kamiros into late antiquity. As a result, most of what is visible on the hillside today belongs to the Hellenistic and Roman phases of the town rather than to the archaic city that preceded them.

A City Built on Three Terraces

The site steps down towards the sea on three levels. At the summit sat the acropolis, holding the sanctuary of Athena Kameiras and, crowning the full width of the ridge, a Hellenistic stoa over 200 metres long with two rows of Doric columns — a shaded gallery looking north over the rooftops and out to sea. Beneath it lay one of the site's more remarkable pieces of engineering: a covered reservoir built around the 6th century BC with a capacity of 600 cubic metres, enough water by most estimates for as many as 400 households, feeding a network of terracotta pipes that carried supply down through the town.

The middle terrace was the residential quarter, a grid of parallel streets and rectangular housing blocks, with some of the larger houses arranged around peristyle courtyards. The lower terrace held the public buildings: a Doric temple thought to have been dedicated to Apollo, the Fountain House with the agora spread in front of it, and the Peribolos of the Altars, a row of altar bases dedicated to various deities. The whole plan is a textbook example of Hellenistic urban design fitted carefully to a natural slope.

Two Earthquakes and a Long Silence

Kamiros was destroyed twice. The earthquake of 226 BC — generally the same event credited with toppling the Colossus of Rhodes — flattened the city and its temple, and the great stoa on the acropolis belongs to the rebuilding that followed. A second earthquake in 142 AD brought the town down again, and this time nobody came back. The ruins were left to the hillside and effectively forgotten for the next seventeen centuries.

Rediscovery, and What Left the Island

The site was identified in 1859 by Auguste Salzmann, a French archaeologist, and Alfred Biliotti, then British vice-consul on Rhodes. The two men excavated the acropolis and the surrounding cemeteries between 1859 and 1864, working for part of that period on behalf of the British Museum: in the 1863–64 season alone they opened more than 310 graves and two votive deposits, and roughly 2,400 objects from Kamiros entered the museum's collection.

Among them is the Euphorbos plate, made around 600 BC and painted with Menelaos standing over the body of the Trojan Euphorbos — one of very few Rhodian plates to carry a mythological scene rather than pattern work, and now catalogued in London. An entire class of archaic East Greek pottery, Fikellura ware, takes its name from one of Kamiros' cemeteries, although the clay itself is now traced to Miletus on the Anatolian coast. The Italian Archaeological School resumed systematic excavation in 1928 and combined it with restoration work that ran until the end of the Second World War, and that is essentially the site visitors walk through now.

There is no reconstructed colonnade here and nothing on the scale of the crowds at Lindos: what you get is a bare hillside of house foundations, streets, cisterns and altar bases above an empty stretch of the west coast, with the sea directly below. It sits an easy detour off the coast road, and for travellers already exploring these shores by sea, the ruins make a natural stop when chartering a gulet from Rhodes.